ABSTRACT
Upward mobility has been the North Star of the American dream for generations. For the last 40 years, however, social and economic indicators have made it clear that we can no longer seek movement in that direction. When the film Nomadland won the 2021 Oscar for Best Picture, it showed how mobility, or life on the road, offered a proverbial happy ending or the promise of new possibilities. Underlying the film’s precarity is the American fixation on the myth of progress—the idea that individual and collective lives must follow a storyline that moves upward and onward to a happy conclusion. The 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century revealed a much starker version of reality than the one the film portrays, which is significant, suggesting that our cinematic, myth-making capacity seeks to soften the blow and find something redemptive on the road with its endless horizon. This essay looks at evidence in poetry, film, fiction, and religion that shows how the myth of progress is disintegrating and being replaced in the psyche of many Americans via the way of the—as yet unconscious but still powerful—aesthetic imagination.
